Morgan, Ken. "20th Anniversary of Vietnam War's End."
Chicago Defender, May 23, 1995, p. 12.
Recalling the end of the Vietnam War 20 years earlier, the author
points to the survival and victory of the Vietnamese people as an
inspiration to African-Americans struggling against oppression in
the United States today. Morgan relates a personal anecdote of his
change of opinion towards the war after an encounter with relatives
who saw the struggles of the Vietnamese and African-Americans as
similar, if not the same. In January 1965, Malcolm X said, "The oppressed
people of South Vietnam and in that entire Southeast area were successful
in fighting off the agents of imperialism ... Little rice farmers,
peasants with rifles up against all the highly mechanized weapons warfare ...
and they can't put those rice farmers back where they want them ... We are
against what the U.S. is doing wrong in other parts of the world as well
as here ... What she's doing in South Vietnam is criminal. She is causing
American soldiers to be murdered every day, killed every day, die every
day for no reason at all." The author also cites Malcolm X as the
one who clarified the global impact of oppression. Said Malcolm X,
"It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negroes simply a
racial conflict of Black against white, or a purely American
problem. Rather we are today seeing a global rebellion of the
oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the
exploiter."
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